New state court director comes from prison system

A high-ranking official in the state prison system is the new chief administrator of the California courts.

Martin Hoshino, undersecretary for operations in the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, was chosen by the state Judicial Council on Tuesday to become administrative director of the nation’s largest court system. Hoshino succeeds Steven Jahr, who is retiring Sept. 30 after two years.

After losing about $1 billion in state aid over four years, the courts got a funding increase for the fiscal year that started July 1, but it was only about half of the $266 million court officials said they needed to reopen closed courtrooms and restore services and staff that had been cut back. Some Superior Court judges and labor unions have accused judicial leaders of centralizing power and wasting money while trial courts were starving.

Hoshino heads one of the two divisions of the $10 billion prison system, which has been enmeshed in litigation over its crowded conditions and substandard health care system. He has worked for the department since 2003 and was appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2012 to an inter-agency working group on state trial court funding.

Brown, in a statement, said Hoshino “did an outstanding job of helping the state manage its prison system during a very difficult period. He’ll be a great help to the California judiciary.”

Hoshino and Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye traded compliments in their public statements, and even the Alliance of California Judges, the dissident group that has been exchanging brickbats with the statewide leadership, is giving the new director a pass for now.

“We expect he will bring to the job a commitment to rein in the excessive spending and the overreach of the agency” that administers the court system, said the alliance, which previously criticized the court system for looking only to “insiders” as its leaders.